Former Conservative minister Michael Gove (AFP/File)
Why Muslims (Don’t) Matter: The UK and the Demonization of Sadiq Khan
On April 30, the UK’s Independent Press Standards Organisation upheld a complaint by the Muslim Association of Britain against The Telegraph. IPSO ruled that the newspaper had breached Clause 1 of the Editors’ Code by omitting MAB’s rebuttal to inflammatory allegations.
The Telegraph’s correction after IPSO’s ruling was modest and placed at the bottom of the article. That is standard practice.
What was far from standard was the right-wing campaign unleashed against IPSO. Commentators howled about censorship. Politicians, including the former Conservatice minister Michael Gove, cried foul. There were calls for Parliament to investigate the regulator, with the “Free Speech” Union declaring a “chilling attack on democracy”.
The issue here, contrary to the pose of the manufactured outrage, is not free speech. Instead, it is responsible journalism and the undermining of institutions.
Can those in power be held to account when they distort the truth? According to the UK’s right wing, the answer is only if they permit it.
The IPSO Ruling
On January 11, The Telegraph published an article citing Michael Gove’s statement in the House of Commons declaring MAB as an affiliate of the Muslim Brotherhood. The claim, with a long-standing undertone of Islamophobia, was not accompanied by a response from MAB in the print or online editions. Only after a complaint did The
Telegraph append a denial online.
IPSO’s ruling was clear. Gove’s statement was protected under Parliamentary privilege, and The Telegraph had the right to report on it. However, the outlet had failed to seek a reply or to include MAB’s denial.
“Omitting the complainant’s denial of the allegation was significantly misleading”, particularly given the seriousness of the claim, IPSO concluded. This was a matter of basic journalistic fairness, not censorship, and of ensuring the public were not left with a one-sided, damaging narrative.
No fines were issued. No command was issued to withdraw the article. IPSO simply required The Telegraph to publish a correction that acknowledged both the claim and the denial.
Turning Against The Regulator
IPSO was established as the media’s self-regulatory body with supposedly tougher standards and independence. It was created in the aftermath of the Leveson Inquiry of 2012, which exposed not just illegal phone hacking but a toxic culture of impunity in the press, particularly in tabloids owned by powerful media barons.
Leveson recommended the establishment of an independent regulator underpinned by statute to ensure accountability. But under intense pressure from the press lobby, a watered-down alternative was created.
IPSO was funded and overseen by the industry. It had stronger powers than its predecessor, The Press Complaints Commission, but it was seen as evading Leveson by allowing the press to mark their own homework. The Guardian feared the regulator would be “controlled by the Telegraph, Mail, and News UK”.
Britain’s right-wing newspapers championed IPSO’s creation. They
used it to fend off statutory regulation, insisting they could police themselves. But when IPSO dared to enforce the most basic standards, they rejected its authority. Corrections, if they were ordered, were buried. Apologies were rare. Instead, publications played the victim each time a complaint was upheld.
An Attack on Oversight
The backlash to the IPSO ruling is part of a broader pattern: the systematic undermining of independent oversight in British public life.
Judges have been labelled “enemies of the people”. Human rights lawyers are derided as “activists”. Even civil society groups that challenge power, from charities to advocacy organizations, are smeared as “woke” or “extremist”.
The message is clear: any institution that holds power to account is a problem to be dismantled. From IPSO to the judiciary to the Equality Act to the European Court of Human Rights, oversight is framed as obstruction.
History tells us that when oversight fails, courts are vilified, regulators undermined, and power is left unchecked, democracy becomes brittle. The rules dissolve. The line between truth and propaganda blurs. And in that void, those with the loudest, most extreme voices thrive.
Real-World Consequences
Consider the attack on the Finsbury Park mosque in north London in 2017. Darren Osborne, a British man radicalized by anti-Muslim propaganda, drove a van into worshippers, killing Makram Ali and injuring nine others. His trial detailed how Osborne had consumed a toxic cocktail of mainstream tabloid headlines and far-right material. He believed the lies. And he acted on them.
In 2020 a far-right extremist, spurred by government rhetoric branding immigration lawyers as “activists” and “enemies,” attacked the offices of London’s Duncan Lewis Solicitors, a firm known for challenging unlawful deportations. Thankfully, no lives were lost.
In his police interview, the assailant said he chose the firm as it was named in a Daily Mail article.
Beyond the physical harm of these incidents is the erosion of trust. The UK now ranks among the lowest in Europe for public trust in media. Only 31% of people say they believe the press acts in the public interest.
That collapse of credibility is not accidental. It is the product of distortion, denial, and failure to hold the media to account.
The Authoritarian Movement
Across the world, authoritarians have used the same strategy: discredit oversight, flood the public sphere with lies, and cast all accountability as censorship.
Donald Trump calls the media “the enemy of the people”. Viktor Orbán in Hungary takes control of almost all media outlets. Narendra Modi’s India targets journalists with raids and prosecutions.
In each case, the steps are the same: attack the referees, then rewrite the rules. As Gove did over MAB, adopt the language of free speech as a shield from scrutiny.
The far right is laying the groundwork for unchecked power. By delegitimizing oversight, they hope to eliminate it, freeing them to act with impunity.
We must defend the institutions that guard our democracy — not because they are perfect, but because once these checks are gone, the road to authoritarianism is wide open.
Avoiding that road requires more than rhetoric. It demands an effort to bridge social and political divides, to curb the use of inflammatory rhetoric, and to strengthen mechanisms of accountability.
Without these, the erosion of trust and breakdown of democracy becomes irreversible.
